Week 2 Work

This week I decided to focus more on tartan design after some of the feedback in class on my work for week one. My focus right now is on a Montgomery dress tartan, which is something on which I had begun work as long ago as this past summer but with which I am not yet satisfied.  Here is the original tartan:

Here are the designs I'd already done:

I noticed in looking at other tartans and in designing them myself that multiple thinner lines are more elegant than large sections of colour, and that even though high contrast is awesome, colours have a lot more depth if they are gradated into one another.  For example, I explore this a lot in that very last version, bringing in lighter and lighter complements of the dark red, green, and blue- pink, light green, and baby blue- to soften the edges of these colours.  In a true dress tartan, the base (the section of the largest colour) is typically white, which is a step I didn't take until the most recent version because the original version of my tartan has a very dark base.  The challenge is to create an elegant dress tartan that showcases the original colours and check without deviating too far from the original.

Here is my progress from this week:

This last one is not the complete tartan--you'll notice it lacks the red, but I kept it anyway because I thought this combination of blues and greens worked really well. I think it needs some adjustment regarding thread count though, because that green is really bright, but the colours are what interested me.


I also worked some more on some of the art prints I had drawn elements for last week.  Here is the scroll piece from my drawing, traced and tiled, in two different colours.  I also uploaded them to Spoonflower, one of the websites where you can upload your designs and order them on fabric, to make sure that it tiled properly, and it looked fantastic!

Here is another one: